


things you said at four in the morning.

by frozennightmare



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Fluff, Future Fic, Kid Fic, M/M, no this is just fluff, there's nothing else to it, tumblr crosspost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 07:32:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7258276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozennightmare/pseuds/frozennightmare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No, not tonight. He’d given up on sleeping a couple of hours ago. He’d had a late night practice and Snowy kept shoving coffee into his hands because you look like death, Zimmerman. But the white noise of Bitty’s breathing hooks him somewhere behind the eyes, tugging him into the waves with its quiet rhythms.<br/>He sets his laptop on the floor and listens until he falls asleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	things you said at four in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> just sliding this over from my cp sideblog (@bittermans)

“Don’t you have a math test tommorow?” Jack asks, pulling himself up from his near-horizontal position in bed.  
“Don’t you have morning practice?” Bitty yawns. He is half-asleep, eyes held in half-moons as he struggles to stay conscious. He lays on his side, his tablet held up by what Jack can only assume is another pillow or Senor Bun. “What fricking time is it?”  
Jack leans over to check his phone makes a face. “Crisse, it’s almost four. I’m gonna hang up and you’re going to get some rest.”  
He looks back and Bitty’s out cold, hand curled softly in the blankets. The tablet has slipped forward far enough to pick up the sound of his breathing. It’s calming, hypnotic. He considers hanging up so the call won’t kill the power on Bitty’s tablet.  
No, not tonight. He’d given up on sleeping a couple of hours ago. He’d had a late night practice and Snowy kept shoving coffee into his hands because _you look like death, Zimmerman_. But the white noise of Bitty’s breathing hooks him somewhere behind the eyes, tugging him into the waves with its quiet rhythms.  
He sets his laptop on the floor and listens until he falls asleep.  
——-  
“Congratulations,” Bitty says idly, “I think you’ve scarred Chowder for life.”  
Jack takes a few seconds to respond, trying to remember how to put his brain back together. It doesn’t help that Bitty seems to think an appropriate after-sex postion is lying across his chest, elbows digging into his ribs as he picks up his phone to text Lardo, knees making furrows in the bedsheets.  
“In my defense,” Jack says slowly, because his brain is having a hard time with the English language right now, “most people in the Haus are asleep now.” He raises his voice just enough to carry. “Most people in this house don’t stay up till dawn watching Sharks highlight reels!”  
Chowder shifts his chair very loudly in the other room, making sure to hit the floor so hard it shakes.  
“Shh. You hear that?” Bitty shakes his head and laughs. Very, very faintly, the NBC announcer is yelling about a play.  
“Incredible. Fucking incredible.” Jack tilts his head back to stare at the ceiling and traces his fingertips against the short side of Bitty’s hair. Bitty hums and leans into it, focus remaining on his phone.  
“What novel are you writing?” Jack asks.  
“Lardo sent me screenshots of every text from Chowder from the past twenty minutes. Ahem.” He sits up on his elbows a little. Jack winces at the pressure increase on his ribs. Bitty starts reading in his best approximation of Chowder’s voice. “ ‘Jesus. They’re at it again. You know what I didn’t need in my life, Lardo? Having to hear _Jack Zimmerman’s_ fucking _sex voice_ every time he decides to visit. Why is he so LOUD. HONESTLY. HELP ME. I thought I got out of having to listen to my parents have sex when I moved out.” He raises an eyebrow at that one, then keeps going. “WHY DO I SHARE A WALL WITH THESE PEOPLE.’ So yeah, I’m baking another bribery pie tomorrow.”  
“We’re the parents? Since when?”  
“You did give him your dibs.” Bitty puts his phone down and lays out flat, rotating himself so he fits over Jack like a matching puzzle piece. “And I keep cooking him pies. So we’ve pretty much adopted him.”  
“I’m sure Shitty would recognize that as a legal document.” Jack chuffs. He wishes he had his camera within arm’s reach. He wants to document this moment, freeze it in a chunk of film, a piece of glass. Something he can hold in his hands and rough his fingers on the edges of. Something to remind him of fairytales.  
“Ever wonder about that? What we’d be like as parents.” Bitty asks, and shit, yeah, he has, but he’s never articulated it. He keeps telling himself they really haven’t been together long enough to discuss things likes that.  
(He can’t explain how six months feels like eternity. How in a distance so brief he feels like he’s traveled the breadth of the world, and now he just wants to settle down in a rocking chair with this boy and watch the stars fly by.)  
“Oh, once.” he breathes easy instead. “You’d spoil them rotten and forget to tell them to do their homework, but you’d be the sweetest dad on the face of the earth.”  
“And you’d teach them better French than I ever managed and I’d understand none of it. We could take them skating together.” Bitty smiles into his collarbone, pressing a ghost of a kiss into the bony ridge there. “Hmm.”  
Jack sits up on his elbows, his whole body a question mark.  
“I’m just thinking,” Bitty says, leaning forward to kiss him again with a bit more intention. “What’s the line straight people usually use in movies? After they talk about kids and shit? ‘Want to get started right now’?”  
He looks up with a smirk. Jack rolls his eyes and pulls him in closer with a loose arm. He can’t believe how gone he is on this boy.  
“Wait.” he says suddenly. He covers Bitty’s mouth with his hand, silencing his breath, and listens.  
Faintly, very faintly: _and Paveleski’s got a penalty-_  
Jack looks up with a expression of absolute evil. “Want to scandalize our kid?”  
“Jesus Christ yes.”  
—-  
spiders, there are spiders in his throat, crawling up and down his trachea. slim, flat ones on his neck ones, sitting heavy and thick, a cluster deep in his lungs. he forgets how to breath. his brain finds a track at the raceway and grabs a getaway car, replaying practice, the meeting, everything. _and if- and if george finds out about this- i haven’t played this bad in months- fixitfixtfixit_  
he reaches out in the darkness, stumbles forward into his bed. the spiders have found new friends, walking sticks trembling their way up and down his fingers. he bites down on his tounge, salt waves forming at the edges of his eyes.  
“jack?” a statue stirs in the darkness, grabs hold of his arm. it is solid, intransigent. it cannot heal, but for a brief moment it grounds him.  
he tips his head forward and finds a space against bitty’s chest, the pads of his fingers gripping tight to bitty’s arms. he fights the tears but they come anyways, sharp against his face. fuck.  
“sorry,” he mumbles, “it’s late, i’m a mess, i’m sorry-”  
“no.” the statue says firmly. he kisses jack’s head and holds.  
he does not let go.  
———-  
The alarm is going off.  
The alarm is going off and Jack is _laughing_ , honestly, what kind of animal has he _married_ -  
“What.” Bitty grumbles into the pillow. “What’s so funny?”  
“Did you seriously set an alarm with the title _go the fuck to sleep?_ For four am?” Jack turns it off and drapes himself over Bitty.  
“I forgot I had that.” Bitty says. Jack is like a thermal blanket, radiating heat into him. Few seconds and he’ll fall back asleep. “Must have turned it on by accident.”  
“Why do you even have that?”  
“It’s from a couple years ago, when we kept skyping all the time. You nagged me about it so much I had to set an alarm to remember to sleep.”  
“Incredible.” And then Jack decides to get up, moving the pillow Bitty had smashed his face into with him. Bitty hisses at the sudden sunlight and paws at the covers, trying to burrow back into the darkness. “jackwhatareyoudoing,” he hisses incoherently.  
“You realize it’s like nine, right? Your phone must have been fucked up by the time change.” Jack opens the hotel curtains with a flourish, sunlight flooding into the room. Bitty looks up for half a second to memorize the image- Paris, Jack Zimmerman’s ass, it’s his two favorite things in the world in one shot- and then crawls back under. “I saw this crepe stand when we walked back last night-”  
“No.”  
“No?” Jack says incredulously, unable to process the fact that _Eric Richard Bittle_ is turning down a chance at pastries.  
“It’s my honeymoon, asshole.” Bitty says. “And if that dictates I want to be a blanket gremlin for another hour and a half, then so be it.”  
“Ok.” Jack closes the curtains back up and shakes his head. The bed dips as he lays back down, pulling Bitty into the curve of his body. “Well, when my blanket gremlin decides to wake up, I have something planned.”  
“I’ll pass it along.” Bitty says, lets himself be kissed, floats back asleep.  
———-  
“Want some company?” Jack asks, descending from the dark upstairs into the single light of the den. Bitty nods and pulls his feet back to make room on their striped couch. Around them, the house tremors in the weight of the storm. The wind snaps a tree branch against the back window and for a moment Jack wonders about that big oak out back, if he should have taken it down.  
“I thought with a four year old we’d skipped this” Bitty says softly, his thumb stroking Sydney’s little head as she dozed against his chest.  
“Guess the storm must have scared her.” Jack replies. He glances out towards the back window, the shadows of the trees looming dangerously through the screen. “It’s starting to scare me.”  
“It’ll pass.” Bitty hums. “Are you worrying about that dumb tree again?”  
“It’s just so close to the house-”  
“It’s sturdy. It’ll hold.” He looks up with a small smile. “How do we always end up awake at this hour?”  
“No clue.” Jack gets up to turn off the lamp, plunging the room into darkness. They are consumed by the pounding of the outside noise, the house a ship at sea carrying itself across the waves. Bitty sits up so he can fit himself better on the couch when he lies back down, wrapping his legs around Bitty’s smaller form and throwing his arm over the back so all of three of them won’t fall off in the night. The couch was never built for two. They’d picked it up at a garage sale down the street. Bitty’d been in love with the pattern, Jack had sighed and acknowledged the fact he’d have to scrunch up to fit on it.  
“I think it runs in the family, though.” he says, and closes his eyes against the sound.


End file.
